It is known that contextual advertising information can be locally determined for a user. For example, a local advertising application can execute at a user's Personal Computer (PC) while he or she accesses web sites. These advertising applications may, for example, select an advertisement to be displayed to the user based on a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address associated with a web page that the user is currently viewing. Some advertising applications display advertisements to a user while the user is “offline”. In other words, advertisements may also be locally determined and/or displayed during periods in which a user may not be connected to the Internet.
It might be the case, however, that the selected advertisement should not be displayed to that particular user. In other words, although an advertisement may be contextual (e.g., related to the current URL being visited by a user), the advertisement may not be appropriate. For example, the advertisement might be associated with a restaurant in New York City—but the user might currently be in California. Similarly, the user might have recently seen an advertisement for the same product or service. In some cases, the user may have even already purchased the item being advertised.
Moreover, the user might not realize that the advertisement is being provided by a third party (i.e., a party not necessarily associated with the web page he or she is currently viewing). In existing systems, for example, a user might be confused as to whether an advertisement is associated with a particular web site, URL, corporation, or other entity.